Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you. This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. So we fail to impart the lessons and each generation is forced to relearn them on their own. It can be maddening to know something is correct but unable to convince someone who must experience it themselves in order to see. But it's just life and humanity, it just works that way.

>This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience.

Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off.

But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired.

This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't.

It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?

Wow.

You sound SO different from me. I really struggle to form relationships so easily, yet it sounds like you making lasting relationships wherever you go.

I find that kind of fascinating. As someone who just went back into the office with the whole intent on being more social, I still find that my interactions with coworkers are at "arms length" and are very sterile. Hard to imagine a relationship with them outside of work. That line is still very strong.

Kudos to you. But I would ask, is this an intrinsic skill or did you learn this over time?

Not OP, but I always try to watch out for opportunities to talk about other people's interests. When someone's eyes light up about a topic or they get an excited tone, I try to ask them open-ended questions to get them talking more. Its pretty affirming to get thoughtful questions about a topic you have strong interest in.

It works even better if you can manage to remember those things people get excited about. Even if you don't remember anything else about the person, it gives you something to revisit in future conversations.

I do the same, but getting people to open up to discuss that initial thing that interests them can be a challenge in itself. I think that's the art of small talk, it's teasing out information from someone, and gaining their trust, so that they eventually let their guard down and mention something close to them that you can expand on. I have no problem connecting with people past that point, but it's the initial small talk and trust gaining stages where I suck.

I've heard from people who are good at this that it comes from a genuine interest in other people. They're able to work through the small talk phase because they're driven by an intrinsic desire to learn more about the person. I definitely do not have that trait.

I can understand that; I think there's also hesitation at that point in any relationship, where both parties are unsure of how much to invest in further social interactions.

One thing I would say though: if you believe that this is an intrinsic trait that others have, rather than something that can be learned, then this belief may hold you back more than you may think.

You have to be careful, because work friends can suddenly vanish when you change jobs, but anyone with a bit of social awareness can navigate this.

WFH has changed work from a social experience into something boring. I get it, work is work, and maybe treating it as a more significant part of life isn't a shrewd move, but I am definitely missing out something in this current state.

(That being said, I do understand that I may change my mind in 10 years, assuming I have a family. But I can only talk about how this seems today.)

There are two different statements one can make: "don't make friends at revolve one's life around work" vs. "don't only make friends at and revolve one's life around work". I'm making the latter statement. Edit to add: I think you're also making the latter statement, so I don't think we disagree.

Sounds exhausting (and distracting) trying to maintain anything beyond a superficial relationship with so many acquaintances gained from all the vectors in the life described above.

Enjoying the convenient food, comfortable workstation, and low level social interactions you get from a good workplace is not an investment at all. If you get fired or quit then you just get the same thing at the next job. I speak from experience having done this multiple times.

Your point about not over-investing into a company that doesn't care about you is valid, but not relevant.

It is relevant because many people in our industry replace hobbies, diversions, and friendships outside the workplace with those within. If they instead merely augment them, that's great. But there can be many temptations to transition through augmentation into replacement.

I think a lot of the benefits you (can) get from this you can take with you after you leave the company. I have good friends I still hang out with from my previous work places 1 and 6 years ago. If it would have been all/mostly virtual interactions, I'm sure things would have been OK, but I don't think it would have resulted in the same level of connection with some of my coworkers. YMMV, different people form connections differently.

> Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you.

I think how much you invest into this faceless entity is independent from whether you WFH or the office, no?

In theory, yes, but in practice many offices are designed to draw employees into the company being a lifestyle rather than a place to work, in a way that is difficult to accomplish without the office. (This is why there is so much hesitance from these companies to ditch their offices!)

Oddly nobody seems to wonder this about the golf and yachts of executives. Yes, very successful companies generate lots of free cash flow, and there are myriad expressions of this, like extremely wealthy executives, staff that enjoys niceties like socializing while at work, and lots of other stuff. Customers are not actually very sensitive to the size of margins taken, in many many businesses.

Let me be the devil's (to be read corporate) advocate for a moment here. You say:

> Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?

I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club!

Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive.

Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.

Why?

Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.

>Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for.

And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work?

I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.

Because you have a limited amount of time to invest in certain things in life, and it's better to invest that time independently of your work environment. Not saying that you can't ever have it, just that some day will be your last day at wherever you are, and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.

The fact that I have a limited amount of time to invest in things is exactly why those things are necessary to have at the workplace.

I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends!

>and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.

See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.

And as I stated, things change as life goes on. I'm not telling you these things to piss on your parade. I'm giving you perspective that you clearly don't have yet.

Don't assume things about me, and don't condescend onto me like you're some wise master. I'm not some young fresh college grad. I've been around the block plenty, worked at plenty of companies, lived in multiple cities and countries, and seen my fair share of come-and-ago friends. Nothing about what I said changes.

I'm sorry that apparently you haven't been able to (or just haven't bothered to) build the relationships I have been able to, but work is unequivocally an indispensable part of how I (and many others) enjoy life and meet people. I absolutely wouldn't give up the friendships that I made at my workplaces for anything.

The root of the problem you descibe are incentives for why workplaces exist. They exist so employees can go there and work. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's an explicit contract between employer and employees that both sides agree on.

Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance).

It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial.

That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.

But part of the value of WFH is the ability to lower work-time to something even less than one third. I've always found it extremely difficult to foster worthwhile relationships and have truly fulfilling fun in a corporate PC environment anyway.

Ultimately, at the market level pay rates are tied to productive value. We have a theoretical assumption of 40h/week, but almost everyone understands that it's fictional (and more people are learning that). Most people who are going home and getting the same work done in 2-3 hours aren't working less -- they're working more efficiently, or doing fewer other things (e.g. chatting at the water cooler).

For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.

Your employer is not really motivated to provide those things for you. They have a different motivation, which is to get you to work productively on a job they think needs doing.

They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.

We've learned in this pandemic that for knowledge work the workplace is no longer a requirement for productivity. Work should be what you spend one third of your time doing, but it should not be where. During college I did my homework in the computer labs where other students were doing their work and we chatted and built a rapport despite working on different tasks. I look forward to working out of the office and out of my home and building relationships with people that are not contractually obligated to be with me.

I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.

Totally agree - often it seems people take a transactional approach to work as a way to insulate themselves from social or economic harm, but then proceed to complain about the transactional nature of work that they assist in perpetuating.

But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.

> Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life.

I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.

Not if you take out 56h/week for sleeping.

and commute. even a 'quick' commute (and attendant 'getting started for the day') is going to put you closer to 50h/week. Then another... ~50h/week for sleeping, as you say. The 'commute to an office' is closer to a 1/3rd of you week, and ~1/2 of your waking life for many folks.

Friends are friends and workmates are workmates. A lot of people confuse these groups and think they are somehow the same.

Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network.

In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times.

I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.